Veeam – Can’t get service content. Soap fault.

So the other day I added a new Windows managed server to Veeam and as usual I came  across some errors and issues that had to be resolved, and some tips on what too look out for to resolve them. Besides the one error being used for two different issues (network vs authorization), it’s generally not that bad and easy to decypher exactly which of the two is the cause. However sometimes you come across an error that seems to have multiple causes and knowing which one it is can be sometimes difficult to diagnose.

Today was one of those things, after adding the newly added managed server as a Veeam vSphere Proxy I was hit with this error when attempting to complete any replication jobs…

Processing configuration Error: Client error: Cannot get service content.
Soap fault. No DataDetail: 'get host by name failed in tcp_connect()', endpoint: 'https://vcenter.domain.local:443/sdk'

Googling this I found one post on the Veeam forms that was a basic dead end.

And this nice thread on Spiceworks.

The only thing different between this Proxy and my other one was that it was not domain joined, which I didn’t see as a pre-req… and sure enough it’s not, but in my case it was phlights response that nailed it for me:

“I attempted to connect to vcenter from my remote proxy and found that it didn’t have an entry for vcenter in DNS.  Remoted into vcenter and performed ipconfig /registerdns.  Remote proxy could then connect to vcenter.  I did a test replication job successfully. Yeah!”

In my case the error showed the vcenter server by the hostname that was not fully qualified, domain joined machines will auto add the domain suffix on a DNS request, but in this case a standalone system, even pointing to the same DNS servers, won’t. As soon as I saw this I had two options:

1. Add a domain suffix in the DNS settings of the Proxy as to make the vcenter server lookup succeed OR
2. Just add a static record in the Proxy host file.

since I didn’t need this system to do any other particular domain looks up I simply did #2. Then my Replication job worked. Why it didn’t fall back to another proxy that did work is beyond me…..

Also why the proxy needs to communicate with vCenter is also beyond me…

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